Soft Bio-inspired Electronics

Although recent advances in flexible and stretchable device technologies have resulted in meaningful progress to the goal of the high-performance skin-like electronics and artificial visions, significant challenges still exist in terms of novel materials and device designs. The mechanical mismatch between conventional rigid electronics and soft human skin oftentimes causes various issues, such as a low signal-to-noise ratio of skin-like sensors, long-term side effects on the tissue interfacing with the skin-like devices, and ineffective and imprecise feedback stimulations. The approach using intrinsically-soft conductive materials and their application to skin-like electronic devices have a potential to solve these issues, and thus functional nanomaterials and their composites with elastomers have been actively researched. Meanwhile, developing a miniaturized artificial vision, which enables fast object detection and amphibious imaging with wide field-of-view (FoV), is an important goal for mobile robotics including drones and unmanned vehicles. However, this goal is still challenging to achieve in consideration of bulky and heavy optical systems employed in the conventional imaging devices. Inspired by structural and functional features of the natural visions, therefore, novel miniaturized, wide FoV, and amphibious artificial visions using curved types of ultrathin and/or stretchable image sensor arrays have been developed. In this webinar, recent technological advances in such instrinsically soft skin-like electronics and bio-inspired artificial visions will be introduced.